Quote:
Originally Posted by jetjet
some very old very relevant websites have been known to completely redesign and change their sites, so it would be irresponsible for google to punish a site for changing all their links around... of course old links would die and the traffic from them would disappear, but new links should not suffer any kind of penalty from this kind of thing (making a custom 404 redirect is something I like to do if you aren't going to bother with 302s)
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Some of the websites I use change every few years when the government departments shuffle around. Rather than reworking the existing structure they just kill everything and do it from scratch - which leaves all of the existing deep links (both from third party sites and their own content) pointing to generic 404 pages...
If they were a commercial company I'd tell the boss to shoot the IT dept for wasting all that traffic and making the user's experience that much harder.